If you want to be an effective leader--at any level--you should pay attention to vision. Leaders who communicate a strong vision are seen by their bosses and coworkers as more effective in several important areas than those who do not. The content of your vision affects employees' perception of your organization. Your articulation of the vision affects their perception of your leadership effectiveness. Taken together, vision content and vision articulation give your employees, colleagues, and other stakeholders a powerful image of how good your organization is how skilled you are as a leader.

This book offers help in making changes - and in getting people to notice them. It's hard work deciding to change and then making the change happen. But what if you're doing all that work and making significant changes - and no one notices? It can be very discouraging But take heart This book shows you how to move on with the follow-through: getting people to notice that you are changing.

To be a successful leader, you need to get results. To get results, you need to set priorities. This book can help you do a better job of setting priorities, recognizing the personal values that motivate your decision making, the probable trade-offs and consequences of your decisions, and the importance of aligning your priorities with your organization's expectations. In this way you can successfully meet organizational objectives and consistently produce results.

One part of your job as a leader is to create commitment to your organization's vision. In order to do this, you have to communicate the vision effectively. In this guidebook we suggest many ways to communicate a vision. We also discuss how to deal with a resistant audience and what to do in the event that you yourself are resistant. You'll learn how to communicate a vision to others in ways that will help them understand it, remember it, and then go on to share it themselves.

A great many peer conflicts arise from incompatible goals or from different views on how a task should be accomplished. With honest dialogue these kinds of conflicts can usually be resolved. But other peer conflicts are more troublesome because they involve personal values, office politics and power, and emotional reactions. To resolve these more difficult peer conflicts, managers should examine three key issues that can cause such clashes and also influence their outcome. One, they should assess their emotional "hot buttons" that trigger ineffective behaviors and make conflict difficult to manage. Two, they should examine their personal values and how those might conflict with what their peers find important. Finally, they should assess their power in the organization - which can be related to position, influence, expertise, or some other factor - and learn how to use it to manage conflicts. Navigating these issues won't rid an organization of conflict among peers. But by paying attention to them managers can build effective relationships that will survive these inevitable conflicts and bolster their ability to achieve organizational goals.

Leaders often have to make decisions without complete information, and those decisions are expected to be not only right but also timely. Using reflective techniques can help you learn to depend on your intuition for help in making good decisions quickly. Reflective practices may seem time-consuming at the beginning, but the time you put in on the front end is well worth the investment. It will pay you back both in time and in the quality of the decisions you make.